Bridging the gap between property management and sales

One thing that I promote is the integration between the property management business and the property sales business. In a very general way there are two types of real estate businesses. Broker centric and property management centric. The broker centric business is sales driven. It most likely has a large sales team where the owner is also the broker.

Generally in these businesses the property management department takes second tier to the sales business. In a property management centric business, I generally find that the broker’s primary focus is property management and the sales team is generally either smaller or they do no sales at all. Either way, some businesses find it culturally difficult to completely integrate the two.

In previous blog posts I have discussed the concept of referring data between the two teams and using your rent roll as its own sales market place. This blog is an extension of these two and promotes complete business integration. Integration starts at the planning and forecasting stage. Each year the business should be holding an annual planning day that includes both the sales and property management team. The purpose of this meeting is plan the business goals for the year. Part of this planning day includes setting targets for sales, new business, lead generation and events. Events may include auctions, investor nights, social media campaigns and community sponsorship.

The key to planning these events is not to make them either a sales event or a property management event. As a team, work out how to drive leads and promote the business as a whole. Let me walk through some examples. Often the sales team will organise actions without including the growth team or the property management team. An auction event can draw a big crowd of which all are active buyers in the market. Only one of these is going to buy the property at this auction. The growth team should be working the room and forming relationships with each of these potential buyers. If they buy elsewhere, and they are an investor, there is a higher chance of them giving the management to your business, because of the established relationship made by your growth team at a sales auction.

Another example, with a slightly different context is running a social media campaign. I see many business facebook accounts that have trails of ‘Just Sold’ or ‘Just listed’ campaigns. The general purpose of this is to promote the sales brand and drive sales leads into the business. I would try including premium rental listings to balance the page, but also try promoting investor type sales listings with an estimated return rate, annual maintenance spend or renter history, to attract investors to the business and promote growth into the rentroll.

Two key things to consider when promoting business integration is, how do we promote the entire business to create advocates and drive leads. Use the annual planning day to set sales and new business targets and whole business events to drive leads. All leads coming into the business should belong to the business and a method should be in place to ensure they get to each department. Wins should be celebrated together, as a whole team, and KPI’s endorsed that promote this integration.